Ukrainian surgeons see more wounded soldiers since counteroffensive began

By Samya Kullab Associated Press

The soldiers come with bandaged limbs soaked in blood, faces blackened with shrapnel fragments and stunned eyes fixed on the ceiling, frozen in shock. Lately, they’ve been coming with evergreater frequency.

“Pain!” shrieks a serviceman with a gaping thigh wound as medical workers move him to a surgical gurney.

Evacuated from trenches in the east, forests in the north and the open fields of the south, wounded soldiers begin showing up at the Mechnikov Hospital in late afternoon, and dozens more in desperate need of surgery are wheeled in before the sun rises the next day.

The surge of wounded soldiers coincides with the major counteroffensive Ukraine launched in June to try to recapture its land, nearly one-fifth of which is now under Russian control. Surgeons at Mechnikov are busier now than perhaps at any other time since Russia began its full-scale invasion 17 months ago, according to doctors at the hospital, who declined to be more specific.

In a war where casualty counts are treated as state secrets, the hospital—one of Ukraine’s biggest—serves as a measurement of distant battles. When they intensify, so does the doctors’ workload, which these days consists of 50 to 100 surgeries per night.

“Here, we see the worst of the front line,” Dr. Serhii Ryzhenko, the hospital’s 59-year-old chief doctor, says with a weary smile.

“We have 50 operating rooms, and it’s not enough.”

The Associated Press was given rare access last week to the hospital, a 12-hour visit to witness doctors and nurses care for soldiers rushed from the battlefield to the operating room.

During the day, Mechnikov functions as a normal hospital, treating patients with cancer and other chronic diseases. But every night ushers in the same macabre routine:

Wounded soldiers arrive—many unconscious—and surgeons operate. The soldiers are then sent off to recover elsewhere to create space for the next nightly deluge.

“We hold our own front line here, we understand that we must do this, we must hold on,” said Dr. Tetyana Teshyna, a soft-spoken anesthesiologist wearing pink scrubs.

“It’s very hard,” said Teshyna, who remains calm amid the bustle in this clean, orderly hospital. She wants to say more but is summoned by a nurse. Another urgent surgery is about to start.

Ukrainian soldiers are fighting in multiple combat zones along the 1,500-kilometer (932-mile) front line, but the counteroffensive— focused in the Russian-occupied east and south of the country—has been slow going. Small units are being deployed to probe a Russian army that is deeply dug in, and minefields must be cleared before Ukrainian soldiers can attempt to root them out.

Any initial momentum from the opening phase of the counteroffensive has given way to sluggish advances. Territorial gains have been minimal, despite highly publicized Western donations of military hardware that heightened expectations of a quick Ukrainian breakthrough.

For its part, Russia has stepped up operations in the north of Ukraine, near Lyman, in the forests of Kreminna, in a possible attempt to corner Ukrainian troops there.

Ukrainian soldiers fighting along the front say the ferocity of Moscow’s artillery barrages has surprised them the most, especially in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, where mine-clearing operations leave them badly exposed to enemy fire.

Oleh Halah, 22, was hit by artillery from a Russian tank near Lyman this month, injuring his stomach and legs. Straining to speak in the hospital’s intensive care unit, Halah said his platoon saw the tank coming, but the artillery hit them before they could reach their grenade launcher.

“Twenty-four hours a day, constant shooting, all the time … if not (Russian) infantry, then artillery,” he said. “It doesn’t stop.”

Other soldiers being cared for by Mechnikov’s doctors were injured while clearing mines from Russian trenches. A Belarusian fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers who uses the call sign “Gold” was injured this way. He had been walking slowly with his unit, 5 meters (yards) per minute, when he was ambushed by a Russian soldier hiding behind a dugout.

As evening comes, the pace of activity in the trauma room picks up, with new soldiers arriving nearly every 15 minutes.

Discordant voices of doctors and other hospital staff echo in the halls, describing blood loss and case histories. Diagnoses are called out: shrapnel in the brain, a burned respiratory tract, shrapnel in the legs, a bullet in the arm;